Category: Baking

Sliced

Sliced 2

15 oz spud

Before the slice

Oh, the agony!

11 oz spud

Mashed and water

Savories!

Yes – orange peel!

Pre-bake

Cooling

Tasting

Slicing

Criticising

Yep, folks, it’s time for the monthly Daring Bakers challenge! For this month we were supposed to make potato bread. We were to start out with a smallish amount of potato if we’re not experienced at making potato bread; thanks for that challenge, by the way Tanna, which assured that I would take the bait and cram as many potatoes into the bread as possible. 😉

All kidding aside, it would have been wise for me to start out with the 8 oz of potato recommended, but I tried for the full 16. The first time ’round, I boiled the potatoes, let them sit … and they turned kinda funky (technical term: rotten and stringy, because I forgot them over night) Alas, the cosmos (and organic gardening) were truly against me, as the truly mighty spud I selected for the next attempt turned out to have a dark heart! After trimming and pruning I ended up with around 10 oz of potato, which I duly boiled & saved the water from. The instructions were (thankfully) not so strict this time around, so I felt that I was within regulations by including some olives, onion, rosemary, and orange peel in the loaves (she said they had to be savory).

This was the first time ’round for our pizza stone over here in the UK, despite having installed it into the oven quite some time ago. I just … well, have been scared for it, considering the generally wimpy nature of the oven. So, onto the stone they went, 4 loaves … which didn’t really want to all fit onto the stone, and which didn’t have enough elbowroom nor enough space to just hang over the edges a little. So, with much squeezing, they all shared the stone, and turned out … well, tasty, but not so perfect.

In the future, I’ll be doing a smaller batch lying to you, saying I’ll do a smaller batch, when I’ll be just wishing that I had, complaining about the batch size, and making excuses. Hrumph. Yes. Well. Perhaps, though, I’ll try to see if there’s a better position for the stone in the oven, as the bottoms of the loaves didn’t get done as darkly as I thought they should have, while the top-crust formed quite a few bubbles just beneath the crust, which says to me that the heat was coming from the top rather than from beneath, as it should with a stone. So, I figure that the stone didn’t do its job. Maybe it’s something to do with it being a convection oven? Anybody have any ideas?

The bread was quite tasty, tender, and generally wonderful. The rise was a bit abysmally slow, and I attribute that to the fact that I forgot to use something other than tap water in which to boil the potatoes. So, the poor wee yeasts were struggling for life with chlorine, not to mention that they’re this strange yeast we find over here, and that I’m not used to. I’ve one more can of the stuff, and then I’m switching back to my vacuum-sealed brick of yeast brought along from the US, which is quite familiar to me, if rather flavorless.

As far as what happened to these loaves, one of them went over to Holler, and the others … vanished mysteriously. Quite rapidly. Probably too rapidly. This type of thing is why we used to give bread away to our neighbors, but since we’re in the UK now, we’ll probably not have anybody to share with for another decade or so. 😉

So, enjoy the other versions, and thanks for listening to me ramble on about bread once again! Can you tell that we like it, over here?

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Since we’re not so close to anyone here & our neighbors haven’t discovered that we bake yet (meaning that we get to eat most of it), I branched out a bit in my baking, to include three varieties of bread from one base batch. Starting with my basic recipe (4 cups water, 1 Tbsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 2 cups oat bran, 2 cups flax seeds, 1 cup steamed whole oats, flour), I rolled up one plain loaf (in the middle), one Olive / Orange Peel / Onion loaf (to the left), and 2 Ginger / Raisin / Orange Peel / Lemon Peel / Brown Sugar / Cinnamon / Clove / Nutmeg loaves. Sadly, there are only about 6 slices of the plain left. We had the last slices of the raisin loaves this evening, and the olive one went … well, probably within 3 days.

Since developing film involves two trips to the camera shop, and the camera shop is over the hill from the University, I’ve been kind of holding back on getting film developed. It’s a bit of a slog, frankly, and out of my usual route to classes. So, I encourage you to visit the latest chunk of pictures up on the Flickr site.

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The fact is, no matter what esoteric days of celebration you come up with, the average, ordinary joe types of things must still be accomplished, and that’s where I come in.

See, the truth is, not every bread is going to be… pretty. The staff of life is at times pretty knobbly and gnarly, and the types of bread people make the world over aren’t often made with the word ‘artisan’ in mind. Sometimes they’re made out of leftovers, with the baker’s eyes half open. Like this cornbread.

Though I prefer to use white corn, as it is more tender, I will use whatever corn comes to hand (but not yet hominy — hm… does that even count as corn anymore?). This time it was yellow kernel corn, and I had a fine yellow cornmeal to match. (In the UK it seems that cornflour is corn starch, and cornmeal is very finely ground, unless it is …polenta. It all makes sense eventually.)

Measuring implements don’t always come in even when we have them to hand, but I would say this cornbread was made of roughly a cup of flour to a cup of meal, with a quarter cup of oat tossed in just for good health. I’d say there was about a cup of cornmeal, a tablespoon of olive oil, a pinch of salt and some baking powder added. You can easily use frozen corn as well for this simple, rustic, not-yet-quite-awake cornbread recipe.

My first baking job was to smash bananas when I was very small, probably about three. Since I had a lousy temper, I took out a lot of miniature aggressions on that soft fruit, and I remember it being very hard work. That makes me smile, I must have been really tiny to get tired out from mashing a fruit that is already soft! My mother often baked multiple loaves of banana bread at a time, so I sometimes had to mash four bananas at a time, which can be challenging, since I hated “lumps” in my bread at the time, and went for as smooth a pureé as I could create with a fork. Nowadays, I leave in chunks, and since there are only we two peas rattling around in this pod, I try to cut back (or we will eat enough for a family of five. Easily.) and use one banana, smush-chunked, per loaf as a rough guide.

Of course, my guide was a bit more rough this time than usual, and I wasn’t quite as successful with my measuring. The cornbread was in the oven, the postman was at the door, I was making a cup of tea, and I unthinkingly just dumped flour into the pot… (er, bowl.) “Uh-oh,” I thought.

(Yes. That words comes up frequently when I bake. Frequently.)

Knowing I had more flour than I should, I used two bananas. And then, well, it seemed like this bread would simply need… more other stuff. Like wheat bran. And oat bran. And dates. And raisins. And ginger… and the “ands” kept adding up.

“I want to go officially on record as saying that your banana bread scares me,” Mac announced as he peered into the oven. My bread scared him? My bread scared me. With pans so small, such a high rise in a fruit bread can be dicey. Having those guts actually baked is important, and the heat doesn’t always penetrate thoroughly without without the top charring. I had an anxious forty minutes or so as I peeped at the bread and weighed leaving it to bake longer or turning it off. I finally opted to turn it off after the forty minute mark, and just let it coast in a hot oven. I’m pleased to say that it looks quite done, is tender, slightly crumbly, and has a nice crumb. I’ll let someone else discuss how it tastes.

Happy Bread Day. Artisan or rustic, savory or sweet, may you enjoy your bread today.

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OK, folks! Today is World Bread day, so we’re showing … rolls. Yes, rolls. I know – it could have been something deeper, something more artisanal … but you get rolls. They have green olives, onions, garlic, and cumin in them, if that counts for anything?

This is the first batch of bread using Allinson yeast, and I must say that I really liked everything about it. It reminded me of Rize yeast, in its smell, because it smelled a bit … well, funky. Like sweaty feet, a little, or maybe a strong cheese. But the granules of yeast were huge, and it proofed wonderfully! I’m going to have to adjust the quantity of yeast downwards quite a bit with this brand, I can see, as this batch came together almost as quickly as I could handle it, and the rise was active enough to have had the rolls rise to +50% of their size by the time I was done forming all of them!

Ingredients-wise, these contain whole wheat flour, Hovis Seeded flour, wheat bran, oat bran, Seville orange-peel stuffed green olives, onion, garlic, cumin, yeast, and salt. No quantities are available for any of the ingredients due to a lack of measuring implements, but it’s just basically a standard bread recipe with … extra stuff bodged in. (shipping update: our belongings are now in a warehouse 10 miles away, but no delivery date yet)

They won’t last very long, sadly, with nearly half of this batch being ravenously consumed straight from the oven. I think it may have been the orange peel which actually makes them so tasty, as it’s an unusually bright flavor amongst all of the savories.

Do click through to the World Bread Day blog-event site host, to see if you can find some updates & other bloggers who are participating. There should be a roundup posted there at some point this weekend, and I’ll update this post with the link when it comes. Until then, though, I’m pretty sure that The Barmy Baker or some other of the Daring Bakers will be participating.

It’s not too late for you to participate, either!

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Our lunch today was accompanied by cumin-flavored crackers (a.k.a. “cookies” in the UK), thanks to a recipe found on Sunita’s World. I must admit that I started out to make the recipe because I read the post, in which these are described as cookies … and only when I was into the recipe did I realize that they didn’t call for all that much in the way of sugar, so were going to be what I’d call crackers!

Well, as soon as I realized this, I readjusted my mental landscape a bit: I’d been anticipating something sweet – and was wondering how in the world sweet would go with cumin! They are delicious little savory crispy flat-bread things, though, by whatever name you call them. Thank you, Sunita!

Ours were square rather than round (still no belongings, much less kitchen implements like cookie-cutters or measuring cups – 75+ days and counting). Also, I modified a bit, to end up with something more along the lines of:

• 1C seeded whole wheat flour
• 1C whole wheat flour
• 1/2C wheat bran
• 2 Tbsp cumin seeds, roasted & broken
• 1 Tbsp capsicum / pepper flakes
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 1 Tbsp oil
• 1/2 c of milk

What this gave us were these marvelously savory, delightfully spicy little crackers. In the future I’d probably cut the salt way down – possibly to nothing, actually. I’d also probably want to actually measure things, instead of eyeballing them, but, again, would need to have had something with which to measure.

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Slurry	Into Emergency Home
Yikes!	First Knead
Filling!	Second Rise
“Leftovers”	Risen
Done!	Half-gone!

(No disrespect to the awesome, awe-inspiring Daring Baker sort. But, look: this is me, all right?)

It seemed like such a great idea, which should have been my immediate clue to think twice — nay, thrice about doing it. (But when have I ever done that?) Mac was off to some hideous epistemology class or something that nattered on for two whole hours, and I thought that it would be lovely to come home to some nice sticky rolls like he made for his September challenge. Due to another one of my UK baking measurement malfunctions (How much is a kilogram? Can’t be more than a pound… how about I order four kg. of sweet potatoes?), and my sad tendency to buy things in multiples (but it was two bags of oranges for £2!) we have quite a bit of butternut squash, oranges and sweet potatoes, and I am working on using them up speedily to prevent waste on top of stupidity. (!!) I figured that there must be a recipe that could successfully use two out of the three, and of course, there are legion. But I thought I should make some bread.

My first idea was to come up with a quick bread, but sweet potato breads that are quick breads tend to be too sweet and a bit heavy. I decided to do a yeast raised bread instead. That was a big jump, since I don’t bake bread much, and we have zero measuring ingredients, but I grew up with my mother whipping up bread from nothing, and I figured, “Eh, it should be fine.”

(Again: at that point, alarm bells should have been ringing. But no…I blame it on the weather…)

My first mistake was proofing the yeast. I boiled water in the kettle, then thought, “Ooh, too hot. I’ll kill my yeast.” So, I tossed in some cool water. By now I had about three and a half cups. Now it seemed too cool… You see where this is going? Into those four cups of water — not even still or purified water, but tap — I put in my packet of yeast. Then thought I should put in two — some yeasts proof slowly, and Mac seemed to have said something about that with the type of yeast we have…

After peeling the baked sweet potatoes, I mashed them. They didn’t mash as smoothly as they could have, owning to the fact that our oven is behaving bizarrely, and heating unevenly, so baking potatoes turn out rather odd. I tossed out the firmer chunks of the potatoes, mashed them, added my secret packet of tea, some salt, and about five tablespoons of raw sugar. Once the yeast looked remotely active, I mixed them together and added some flour to create my slurry. I added a cup of wheat bran as an afterthought, figuring it couldn’t hurt.

Mind you, I kept reassuring myself I was doing this exactly the same way Mac would have. Mind you, by the time I remembered to take a picture of anything, the first rise was finished — and I knew I was in trouble. Big trouble. Somehow, when Mac took a picture of his first rise, with the spoon in it and all? It didn’t look like it was about to overflow the pot and take over the kitchen. Mine… did.

“Ooh. Ooh, ooh, ooh,” I muttered under my breath, frantically stirring the dough. I realized that I couldn’t add flour to something already so… spongy. I was already using our largest pot, and so that meant — I was stuck. Just in time, I remembered the dishpan.

Dear ones, before you panic, you’d better believe I washed, scoured, dried, and scoured again that pan before an ounce of my beautiful dough touched it. I was mortified but it was the biggest vessel in the house, and it was …there. And so I used it.

Sweet potatoes are sticky. Dough is sticky. Sweet potato dough? Is almost impossible. I laugh at all of the recipes that say optimistically that one needs to set aside “a half cup of flour for kneading.” Oh, yeah? I added flour. I added what’s called “plain” flour, which is white. I added strong whole meal flour. I added the rest of the bag of the seeded flour. I must have added five cups, but the dough refused to do anything but be a sticky morass for quite some time. Finally, finally it began to show some sign of coming together. I let it rest for twenty anxious minutes while I did my best to clean up the disaster formerly known as the kitchen.

At six, I turned on the oven. I had about fifteen minutes before Mac walked in the front door, and was hopefully treated to that fresh-baked smell. I admit I cheated and put a bit of olive oil on my hands to make handling the sticky dough a bit easier. Like a pizza tosser, I stretched out the most uneven length of dough in bread making history, and decided on my filling — leftover cranberry sauce and a bit of marmalade. A piece of 70% dark chocolate bar seemed the perfect bittersweet compliment to the marmalade. I rolled it, sawed it into slices, and bodged it into the pan.

Whew.

I made plain rolls for the other pan, and tucked them in until I ran out of space. I reused aluminum pans from the store for the last odds and ends, which are huge, but will make great grab-and-go sandwich rolls for the week. By the time I heard a key in the door, one pan of bread was in, the rolls were settled and waiting their turn, and the dreadful dishpan was immersed and being cleaned. Success!

Well. Mostly success, anyway. I had no idea how the gems were going to taste, and I was jittery. Meanwhile, Mac was commenting rather acerbically that my rapid don’t-come-in-yet cleaning up strategy as being intended to leave him with the idea that I never made a mess. (Well — I don’t… Ahem!) And then, he started in his Master Baker questions.

“Look at that rise. Did you remember salt?”

Meekly. “Yes.”

“You used both packets of yeast?”

“Um. Yes.”

“And the purified water?”

“Er…”

By the time we got to such questions as “How much water did you use???” I was dancing out of reach, flipping songs on the CD, humming loudly, convinced if I ignored the Master Baker, he would go away. And he did — when the bread came out of the oven. He retired with a knife and a fork and a plate, and I heard nothing else.

And that’s really good enough for me.

(Note to Kirsten: See? I BAKED BREAD. How’s that for “stand by yer man?” Oh – and I made applesauce, too, with ginger and lemon, so it’s nice and soursweet. Yum.)

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Proof Yeast

Well, folks, here’s this month’s Daring Bakers Challenge. I must say that I really enjoyed this one, as it didn’t require me to measure anything. Not that I’m categorically against measurement or anything, but that I still don’t have my own things from the US yet, so any measurement is done with the palm of my hand.

If you’d like, check out the rest of the Daring Bakers over at Daring Bakers Blogroll, and you’ll get an idea of what everybody else was up to with their interpretation of “sweet rolls.” Ours are quite tasty, I must say.

About the only things which were different about ours are that we used a flour with flax-seeds in it, and that we used a packet of Mandarin Spice tea to provide our dried spices. I went for a multiple rise on the bread, rather than the single rise, simply because that’s the way I usually do bread. It’s not strictly necessary, but it does add a bit of flavor, I feel.

In any event, here are the rolls (those that are left after “tasting”). I’m hoping that they’re equally good as sandwich rolls for the week!

Slurry	Sponge	First Rise
First Rise ending	Knead	Rest
Prep Filling	Filling	Secret Ingredient
No Workspace	Small Batches	Roll Out
Fill	Roll	Slice
“Presentation” pan	“Ends” pan	Baked!

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